“You must have been desperate,” he said quietly. He meant no insult. He was not even thinking of Varner’s daughter’s shame or of his daughter at all. He meant the land, the Old Frenchman place. He had never for one moment believed that it had no value. He might have believed this if anyone else had owned it. But the very fact that Varner had ever come into possession of it and still kept it, apparently making no effort to sell it or do anything else with it, was proof enough for him. He declined to believe that Varner ever had been or ever would be stuck with anything; that if he acquired it, he got it cheaper than anyone else could have, and if he kept it, it was too valuable to sell. In the case of the Old Frenchman place he could not see why this was so, but the fact that Varner had bought it and still had it was sufficient. So when Varner finally did let it go, Ratliff believed it was because Varner had at last got the price for which he had been holding it for twenty years, or at least some sufficient price, whether it was in money or not. And when he considered who Varner had relinquished possession to, he believed that the price had been necessity and not cash.
Varner knew that Ratliff was thinking it. He sat the old horse and looked down at Ratliff, the little hard eyes beneath their bushy rust-coloured brows glinting at the man who was a good deal nearer his son in spirit and intellect and physical appearance too than any of his own get. “So you think pure liver ain’t going to choke that cat,” he said.
“Maybe with that ere little piece of knotted-up string in it?” Ratliff said.
“What little piece of knotted-up string?”
“I don’t know,” Ratliff said.
“Hah,” Varner said. “You going my way?”
“I reckon not,” Ratliff said. “I’m going to mosey down to the store.” Unless maybe he even feels he can set around it too again now, he thought.
“So am I,” Varner said. “I got that damn trial this morning. That damn Jack Houston and that What’s-his-name. Mink. About that durned confounded scrub yearling.”
“You mean Houston sued him?” Ratliff said. “Houston?”
“No, no. Houston just kept the yearling up. He kept it up all last summer and Snopes let him pasture and feed it all winter, and it run in Houston’s pasture all this spring and summer too. Then last week for some reason he decided to go and get it. I reckon he figured to beef it. So he went to Houston’s with a rope. He was in Houston’s pasture, trying to catch it, when Houston come up and stopped him. He finally had to draw his pistol, he claims. He says Snopes looked at the pistol and said, ‘That’s what you’ll need. Because you know I ain’t got one.’ And Houston said all right, they would lay the pistol on a fence post and back off one post a-piece on each side and count three and run for it.”
“Why didn’t they?” Ratliff said.
“Hah,” Varner said shortly. “Come on. I want to get it over with. I got some business to tend to.”
“You go on,” Ratliff said. “I’ll mosey on slow. I ain’t got no yearling calf nor trial neither today.”
So the old fat clean horse (it looked always as if it had just come back from the dry-cleaner’s; you could almost smell the benzene) moved on again, with a rich preliminary internal chord, going on along the gapped and weathered picket fence. Ratliff sat in the still-motionless buckboard and watched it and the lean, loose-jointed figure which, with the exception of the three-year runabout interval, had bestridden it, the same saddle between them, for twenty-five years, thinking how if, as dogs do, the white horse or his own two either had snuffed along that fence for yellow-wheeled buggies now, they would not have found them, thinking: And all the other two-legged feice in this country between thirteen and eighty can pass here now without feeling no urge to stop and raise one of them against it. And yet those buggies were still there. He could see them, sense them. Something was; it was too much to have vanished that quickly and completely — the air polluted and rich and fine which had flowed over and shaped that abundance and munificence, which had done the hydraulic office to that almost unbroken progression of chewed food, which had held intact the constant impact of those sixteen years of sitting down: so why should not that body at the last have been the unscalable sierra, the rosy virginal mother of barricades for no man to conquer scot-free or even to conquer at all, but on the contrary to be hurled back and down, leaving no scar, no mark of himself (That ere child ain’t going to look no more like nobody this country ever saw than she did, he thought) — the buggy merely a part of the whole, a minor and trivial adjunct, like the buttons on her clothing, the clothes themselves, the cheap beads which one of the three of them had given her. That would never have been for him, not even at the prime summer peak of what he and Varner both would have called his tomcatting’s heyday. He knew that without regret or grief, he would not have wanted it to be (It would have been like giving me a pipe organ, that never had and never would know any more than how to wind up the second-hand music-box I had just swapped a mailbox for, he thought) and he even thought of the cold and froglike victor without jealousy: and this not because he knew that, regardless of whatever Snopes had expected or would have called what it was he now had, it would not be victory. What he felt was outrage at the waste, the useless squandering; at a situation intrinsically and inherently wrong by any economy, like building a log dead-fall and baiting it with a freshened heifer to catch a rat; or no, worse: as though the gods themselves had funnelled all the concentrated bright wet-slanted unparadised June onto a dung-heap, breeding pismires. Beyond the white horse, beyond the corner of the picket fence, the faint, almost overgrown lane turned off which led to the Old Frenchman place. The horse attempted to turn into it until Varner hauled it roughly back. Not to mention the poorhouse, Ratliff thought. But then, he wouldn’t have been infested. He shook his own reins slightly. “Boys,” he said, “advance.”
The team, the buckboard, went on in the thick dust of the spent summer. Now he could see the village proper — the store, the blacksmith shop, the metal roof of the gin with a thin rapid shimmer of exhaust above the stack. It was now the third week in September; the dry, dust-laden air vibrated steadily to the rapid beat of the engine, though so close were the steam and the air in temperature that no exhaust was visible but merely a thin feverish shimmer of mirage. The very hot, vivid air, which seemed to be filled with the slow laborious plaint of laden wagons, smelled of lint; wisps of it clung among the dust-stiffened roadside weeds and small gouts of cotton lay imprinted by hoof- and wheel-marks into the trodden dust. He could see the wagons too, the long motionless line of them behind the patient, droop-headed mules, waiting to advance a wagon-length at a time, onto the scales and then beneath the suction pipe where Jody Varner would now be again, what with a second new clerk in the store — the new clerk exactly like the old one but a little smaller, a little compacter, as if they had both been cut with the same die but in inverse order to appearance, the last first and after the edges of the die were dulled and spread a little — with his little, full, bright-pink mouth like a kitten’s button and his bright, quick, amoral eyes like a chipmunk and his air of merry and incorrigible and unflagging conviction of the inherent constant active dishonesty of all men, including himself.
Jody Varner was at the scales; Ratliff craned his turkey’s neck in passing and saw the heavy bagging broadcloth, the white collarless shirt with a yellow halfmoon of sweat at each armpit, the dusty, lint-wisped black hat. So I reckon maybe everybody is satisfied now, he thought. Or everybody except one, he added to himself because before he reached the store Will Varner came out of it and got onto the white horse which someone had just untied and held for him, and on the gallery beyond Ratliff now saw the eruption of men whose laden wagons stood along the road opposite, waiting for the scales, and as he drove up to the gallery in his turn, Mink Snopes and the other Snopes, the proverbist, the school-teacher (he now wore a new frock-coat which, for all its newness, looked no less like it belonged to him than the old one in which Ratliff had first seen him did) came down the steps. Ratl
iff saw the intractable face now cold and still with fury behind the single eyebrow; beside it the rodent’s face of the teacher, the two of them seeming to pass him in a whirling of flung unco-ordinated hands and arms out of the new, black, swirling frock-coat, the voice that, also like the gestures, seemed to be not servant but master of the body which supplied blood and wind to them:
“Be patient; Cæsar never built Rome in one day; patience is the horse that runs steadiest; justice is the right man’s bread but poison for the evil man if you give it time. I done looked the law up; Will Varner has misread it pure and simple. We’ll take a appeal. We will — —” until the other turned his furious face with its single violent emphasis of eyebrow upon him and said fiercely: “ —— t!” They went on. Ratliff moved up to the gallery. While he was tying his team, Houston came out, followed by the big hound, and mounted and rode away. Ratliff mounted to the gallery where now at least twenty men were gathered, Bookwright among them.
“The plaintiff seems to had legal talent,” he said. “What was the verdict?”
“When Snopes pays Houston three dollars pasturage, he can get his bull,” Quick said.
“Sho now,” Ratliff said. “Wasn’t his lawyer even allowed nothing by the court?”
“The lawyer was fined what looked like the considerable balance of one uncompleted speech,” Bookwright said. “If that’s what you want to know.”
“Well well,” Ratliff said. “Well well well. So Will couldn’t do nothing to the next succeeding Snopes but stop him from talking. Not that anymore would have done any good. Snopes can come and Snopes can go, but Will Varner looks like he is fixing to Snopes forever. Or Varner will Snopes forever — take your pick. What is it the fellow says? off with the old and on with the new; the old job at the old stand, maybe a new fellow doing the jobbing but it’s the same old stern getting reamed out?” Bookwright was looking at him.
“If you would stand closer to the door, he could hear you a heap better,” he said.
“Sholy,” Ratliff said. “Big ears have little pitchers, the world beats a track to the rich man’s hog-pen but it ain’t every family has a new lawyer, not to mention a prophet. Waste not want not, except that a full waist don’t need no prophet to prophesy a profit and just whose.” Now they were all watching him — the smooth, impenetrable face with something about the eyes and the lines beside the mouth which they could not read.
“Look here,” Bookwright said. “What’s the matter with you?
“Why, nothing,” Ratliff said. “What could be wrong with nothing nowhere nohow in this here best of all possible worlds? Likely the same folks that sells him the neckties will have a pair of long black stockings too. And any sign-painter can paint him a screen to set up alongside the bed to look like looking up at a wall full of store shelves of canned goods — —”
“Here,” Bookwright said.
“ — so he can know to do what every man and woman that ever seen her between thirteen and Old Man Hundred-and-One McCallum has been thinking about for twenty-nine days now. Of course, he could fix it with a shed roof to climb up on and a window to crawl through too. But that ain’t necessary; that ain’t his way. No, sir. This here man ain’t no trifling eavecat. This here man — —” A little boy of eight or ten came up, trotting, in overalls, and mounted the steps and gave them a quick glance out of eyes as blue and innocent as periwinkles and trotted intently into the store. “ — this here man that all he needs is just to set back there in the store until after a while one comes in to get a nickel’s worth of lard, not buy it: come and ax Mr. Snopes for it, and he gives it to her and writes in a book about it and her not knowing no more about what he wrote in that book and why then she does how that ere lard got into that tin bucket with the picture of a hog on it that even she can tell is a hog, and he puts the bucket back and puts the book away and goes and shuts the door and puts the bar up and she has done already went around behind the counter and laid down on the floor because maybe she thinks by now that’s what you have to do, not to pay for the lard because that’s done already been wrote down in the book, but to get out of that door again — —”
Ratliff moved toward the steps. He began to descend. He was still talking. He continued to talk as he went down the steps, not looking back; nobody could have told whether he was actually talking to the men behind him or not, if he was talking to anyone or not: “ — goes and puts the bar up on the inside and comes back and this here black brute from the field with the field sweat still drying on her that she don’t know it’s sweat she smells because she ain’t never smelled nothing else, just like a mule don’t know it’s mule he smells for the same reason, and the one garment to her name and that’s the one she’s laying there on the floor behind the counter in and looking up past him at them rows of little tight cans with fishes and devils on them that she don’t know what’s on the inside either because she ain’t never had the dime or the fifteen cents that even if he was to give her the nickel, not to mention the lard she come after, she would have after the next two or three times she come after lard, but just heard somewhere one day the name of what folks said was inside them, laying there and looking up at them every time his head would get out of the way long enough, and says, ‘Mr. Snopes, whut you ax fer dem sardines?’ ”
2
As winter became spring and the spring itself advanced, he had less and less of darkness to flee through and from. Soon it was dark only when he left the barn, backed carefully, with one down-groping foot, from the harness-room where his quilt-and-straw bed was, and turned his back on the long rambling loom of the house where last night’s new drummer-faces snored on the pillows of the beds which he had now learned to make as well as Mrs. Littlejohn could; by April it was the actual thin depthless suspension of false dawn itself, in which he could already see and know himself to be an entity solid and cohered in visibility instead of the uncohered all-sentience of fluid and nerve-springing terror alone and terribly free in the primal sightless inimicality. That was gone now. Now the terror existed only during that moment after the false dawn, that interval’s second between it and the moment which birds and animals know: when the night at last succumbs to day; and then he would begin to hurry, trot, not to get there quicker but because he must get back soon, without fear and calmly now in the growing visibility, the gradation from grey through primrose to the morning’s ultimate gold, to the brow of the final hill, to let himself downward into the creekside mist and lie in the drenched myriad waking life of grasses and listen for her approach.
Then he would hear her, coming down the creekside in the mist. It would not be after one hour, two hours, three; the dawn would be empty, the moment and she would not be, then he would hear her and he would lie drenched in the wet grass, serene and one and indivisible in joy, listening to her approach. He would smell her; the whole mist reeked with her; the same malleate hands of mist which drew along his prone drenched flanks played her pearled barrel too and shaped them both somewhere in immediate time, already married. He would not move. He would lie amid the waking instant of earth’s teeming minute life, the motionless fronds of water-heavy grasses stooping into the mist before his face in black, fixed curves, along each parabola of which the marching drops held in minute magnification the dawn’s rosy miniatures, smelling and even tasting the rich, slow, warm barn-reek milk-reek, the flowing immemorial female, hearing the slow planting and the plopping suck of each deliberate cloven mud-spreading hoof, invisible still in the mist loud with its hymeneal choristers.
Then he would see her; the bright thin horns of morning, of sun, would blow the mist away and reveal her, planted, blonde, dew-pearled, standing in the parted water of the ford, blowing into the water the thick, warm, heavy, milk-laden breath; and lying in the drenched grasses, his eyes now blind with sun, he would wallow faintly from thigh to thigh, making a faint, thick, hoarse moaning sound. Because he cannot make one with her through the day’s morning and noon and evening. It is not that he must return to work
. There is no work, no travail, no muscular and spiritual reluctance to overcome, constantly war against; yesterday was not, tomorrow is not, today is merely a placid and virginal astonishment at the creeping ridge of dust and trash in front of the broom, at sheets coming smooth and taut at certain remembered motions of the hands — a routine grooved, irkless; a firm gentle compelling hand, a voice to hold and control him through joy out of kindness as a dog is taught and held.
It is because he can go no farther. He tried it. It was the third time he lay and waited for her; the mist blew away and he saw her and this time there was no today even — no beds to return to, no hand, no voice: he repudiated fidelity and even habit. He rose and approached her, speaking to her, his hand extended. She raised her head and looked at him and scrambled up the farther bank, out of the water. He followed, stepping gingerly down into the water, and began to cross, lifting his feet high at each step, moaning a little, urgent and concerned yet not to alarm her more. He fell once, at full length into the water, making no effort to catch himself, vanishing completely with one loud cry and rising again, streaming, his breath already indrawn to cry again. But he stopped the cry, speaking to her instead, and climbed out onto the bank and approached her again, his hand extended. This time she ran, rushed on a short distance and turned, her head lowered; she whirled and rushed away again before his hand touched her, he following, speaking to her, urgent and cajoling. Finally she broke back past him and went back to the ford. She ran faster than he could; trotting, moaning, he watched the vain stippling of leaf-shadows as they fled across the intact and escaping shape of love as she recrossed the creek and galloped on up the path for a short way, where once more she stopped to graze.
Complete Works of William Faulkner Page 330
